2016-11-22
MR BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — Well, Acting President Dunn, and for the viewers at home, this is one of these motions that the opposition brings in where we note certain things. There is no impact as a result of this motion. It is not demanding a document. They are not introducing a private members bill. They are not disallowing a regulatory instrument. It is simply an opportunity for them to blood their troops. It gives them an opportunity to get up and go off like a frog in a sock on a Wednesday until they have got it all off their liver, but in terms of what impact it will have on the governance of the state, the answer is nil.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — For that reason I am going to be as brief as possible, assuming I am not provoked by my agent provocateur diagonally opposite.
The first word that I noticed when I read the motion was that the opposition claims that this has been a 'divisive' government. This in the week when the Liberal Party's immigration minister came out and said — I am summarising — that it was a mistake to have let all those Lebanese immigrants into the country over all those decades. There are now some 200 000 people of Lebanese origin in Australia, including three members of this chamber who were born in Lebanon. The minister claimed that at the end of that process 22 individuals — the descendants of those immigrants — have been charged with terrorism-related offences, and therefore it was a mistake to have ever let all those Lebanese people into the country.
Ms Wooldridge said that women do not feel safe in Victoria anymore. As a result of the Liberal Party's comments this week, women in my electorate do not feel safe, and the reason is that they wear headscarves as a religious observance. They will now be targeted — we are seeing it happen every week — as a result of wearing a headscarf and as a result of this rabid anti-Muslim rhetoric that is pouring out of the Liberal Party at the moment. Not one member of the Liberal Party has stood up. Not one member of the Liberal Party up there — including the simpering Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull — or in this chamber has come out and said 'that's wrong' about what the immigration minister said. If I were a member of the Liberal Party, I would not be moving this motion; I would be hiding under the doona sucking my thumb, feeling incapable of even walking down the street as a result of the disgusting, divisive comments coming out of the Liberal Party. Let us talk about that for a start before we move past this item where they claim that the Victorian Labor government is a divisive government.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — In the second paragraph of the motion the Liberal Party said that ordinary Victorians have been left behind at the expense of union mates, Labor Party figures and a Socialist Left agenda. They are the villains in Liberal world. They did not mention the big end of town, the big political donors who pour money into the pockets of both the Labor and the Liberal parties. Apparently those guys are either ordinary Victorians who just happen to have a couple of hundred thousand dollars spare to donate to Labor and Liberal when it comes to election time or you just think basically they are a force for good. But when decisions come to be made, actual votes of this Parliament on legislation that impacts on the ordinary Victorian, yet again we see the interests of the electricity and gas companies, property developers, gambling companies and big pubs and clubs — all those same people who found it necessary to donate to the Labor and Liberal parties in the run-up to the election — actually getting represented in the way the votes line up in this chamber, and that is, most often, Greens on one side of the chamber, Labor and Liberal members all crowded hip to hip, trying to fit on the benches on the other side.
But as for this bit about the Socialist Left agenda, my understanding of the intricacies of socialism is pretty limited, but I thought socialism was about collective ownership of assets, nationalisation of key industries and all that sort of thing. That is hardly what has happened over the last two years of the government. In fact one of the biggest remaining economically significant publicly owned assets, being the port, was actually flogged off by this government, with their Liberal Party cheer squad over there providing them the numbers. That is pretty much the opposite of socialism, so I am not sure what the Socialist Left agenda that they are referring to is.
They might be referring to the equality agenda; apparently equality in the human rights sense is part of the socialist agenda. But if we want to talk about the equality agenda, the proposition that has been brought through this chamber by the Greens is that if a student is enrolled in a religious school and then it turns out sometime during that student's academic career in the school that they are gay, or they work out that they are gay, as a lot of teenagers do, or they become openly gay, the religious freedom apparently is to expel them from their school. That is the provision in the act.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — You could have read it. If the member went looking for it, she would have read it in the media last week actually — quite an interesting case study of how a student who came out as gay while in high school at a religious school was discriminated against by that school. That is one instance. We can talk about that one. I do not think it should happen. If a student falls pregnant during year 12 and apparently this pregnancy is outraging the religious sensibilities of the school community, they have the right to expel that student from the school.
Religious-based schools do have the right to discriminate against people on the basis of religion. They generally do not — generally they will enrol anybody who can pay the fees — but why should they be able to discriminate against someone on the basis that they are gay? This might be a point of disagreement amongst Christians, but a lot of Christians I know say that you can be Christian and gay, and therefore to expel a gay student can hardly be discrimination against someone on the basis of their religion, but that is the way they choose to characterise it. Perhaps that is the socialist agenda that they are referring to in this motion.
There are a number of other matters that the opposition raised in their contributions. There are a number of matters they did not raise in their contributions. There was no mention of the environment, for example. There was no mention of greenhouse gases. There was no mention of endangered species. There was no mention of urban pollution. There was very little mention, actually, of livability and what is needed to maintain the livability of this city the way we have all grown to love it, so I will take it from that that the opposition approves of everything the government has done in relation to the environment — which, as we know, is practically nothing.
The opposition is the cheer squad for the government on expanding coal exploration licences over some of the most important farmlands in Victoria. They are the cheer squad for trying to set up, using taxpayer funds, an export coal industry from Victoria. We already know — it is not a point of debate — they are the cheer squad for the government in driving the state's faunal emblem, the Leadbeater's possum, further and further to extinction every year, so the complete absence of any talk about the environment in this motion tells you everything you need to know.
The opposition has no environment policy. They have no response to global warming, and they will proudly go to the 2018 election with absolutely nothing to say about it. The proposition is the state government cannot do anything and should not do anything. You will leave it to Malcolm Turnbull, whose promises in this area to the international community are weak. We are a laggard now. The major economies of the world are no longer trying to free-ride off each other; they are actually trying to compete to see who can get to the end point faster. But Australia is bringing up the rear on that.
Even in terms of the commitments that the federal government made on greenhouse gas emissions they do not actually have the policies to back them up. They have made the promise — the promise is far short of where we need to be — but then they do not actually have policies that would implement even their weak promise. As far as the Victorian Liberal Party goes, it is 'Don't ask us. We want to be the government, but we can't tell you a single solitary thing we'll do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions'.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — Maybe Mr Ramsay, that anti-wind farm warrior, will be able to articulate what the Liberal Party's policy is, or maybe, due to some votes on legislation that is now working its way through the Parliament, we will just find out anyway what the Liberal Party is for or against on renewables, on action on global warming and so forth. But it is 'Don't ask, don't tell' as far as their policy — or even what they think of the government's policy — on the environment goes in this motion.
That got us to a number of the things that the opposition did say were the failings of this government. You have got to understand that the context for this is that they have absolutely given it a red hot go trying to tear down this government in the last two years, and they could not have done it without the Herald Sun — let us face it. The Herald Sun pretty much gave them the biggest campaigning gift they could ever give, and yet the polling that we saw last week was absolutely status quo. It was dead bang on, two years into the government, and the government and the opposition found themselves exactly where they were on election night — 52-48, status quo in two-party preferred.
Nevertheless, we should understand that is actually a wafer-thin majority for the Labor government. That has been their problem from day one. They were given pretty much the skinniest mandate in electoral history, and in fact just a couple of thousand voters changing their minds in three seats would be enough for the Labor government to lose its lower house majority and put the Greens in the balance of power. That is what the government is up against. That is what they have been up against from day one, but they are certainly not up against anything that the opposition has thrown at them, because it does not seem to have had any impact — which is not to say that the voters are not out there expressing their dissatisfaction in ever louder tones.
To access full speeches and debates please visit http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/hansard where you can search Victorian Hansard publications from 1991 onwards.